#Hashtag Contests: Clever Marketing or Twitter Spam?

July 2, 2009 @ 7:42 pm · Filed under Journal

SquareSpace did it last month and Moonfruit is doing it this month. These companies are both using Twitter to market their product by having people tweet something with their company name in the hashtag (#squarespace, #moonfruit). The incentive? For SquareSpace it was the chance to win a free iPhone (sort of) over a thirty day period and for Moonfruit it’s the chance to win a MacBook Pro over the next ten days. Whatever you think of this marketing approach, you can’t argue with the result. #moonfruit is one of the top trending topics today.

@TEDChris has a great post today analyzing this marketing tactic and questioning if it’s really worth polluting your Twitter stream when the chances of winning are so small.

- Would you post an ad for a random company through your friends’ doors in return for for a 1 in 200,000 chance of winning a computer? (If you did that every single day your whole life, chances are still overwhelming that you’d never win… …and even more overwhelming that you’d end up with no friends .)

- Assuming each tweet gets seen on average by 20 people, Moonfruit are buying media “impressions” here at a CPM rate of less than 50 cents… equivalent to ‘junk’ space online, and easily low enough to tempt in a lot of other companies.

- Bottom line… our words and connections are being bought on the cheap! And unless the Twitterverse wises up, we’ll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam.

One Fine Jay compares these types of contests to beautiful highways getting ruined by too many billboards.

Just as the plethora of billboards ruined the skylines of Route 66 and other great highways of the past, advertising today in its most blatant forms has invaded any mental domain imaginable. Nowhere is safe, definitely not Twitter. It’s no surprise that online marketing and advertising would pounce on a free medium to promote their wares.

He goes on to describe how these types of contests put us in the difficult position of deciding whether or not to unfollow people who clutter their twitter-stream with these meaningless hashtags.

… Hashtag contests are turning the people I following into spammers.

This, too, is different from a lottery. Games of chance where participants pay to play are usually regulated. Free raffles are usually not. Take note that I am not yet ready to call shenanigans on this, but instead of paid participation, people offer up their time. In a world of free content all vying for our attention, our time remains the most valuable asset we are all too willing to give up.

Moonfruit’s campaign and the clones it will spawn will lead to a general degradation in the aesthetic of the Twitter stream. To a user, we have but two choices: bear through it, or unfollow someone. Getting spammed three messages at a time by half of my users is a painful thing to sit through, because I’d rather not block or unfollow these people. They are still worth following, and it is this good will that I and others extend to the people we follow that companies capitalize on whenever they do these awful contests.

Kev from Outside Lines says:

Here’s an idea for “Twitter promotion done right” – make a great product, and release it with a clever launch. If it’s smart, everyone talk about it. Get to the top of the trending topics legitimately, not by dangling carrots in front of keyboard-equiped imbeciles who don’t know better.

July 6th Update:
Moonfruit claims that Twitter has censored the #Moonfruit hashtag from Trending Topics.

Coverage elsewhere:

Viewing 5 Comments

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus